The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (45 page)

When people read classics,

they read themselves.

This is like in a plaza

where an audience rings the high stage.

The short man stands on the floor,

he stretches his neck and stands on his toes.

But there are people in high towers on balconies

who watch the performance at eye level.

The show is the same

but the impressions all different.

The short man returns from the theater

bragging about having a close look.

The people upstairs

cannot help cracking up.

She serves two jobs at once—

who says the woman from Wu is unwise?

Carrying a baby on her back,

she rocks the oar and her baby at the same time.

Li Bai's and Du Fu's poems have passed through ten thousand mouths and now they are no longer fresh.

From the rivers and mountains of each dynasty new talents emerge to dominate poetry for a few hundred years.

A guest suddenly appeared knocking at my door

coming to give me a commission for my brush.

He asked me, “Write an epitaph

that will be elegantly written and flattering.

Compare his administration to Long and Huang,
¹

his scholarship to the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi.”
²

I did it as a joke

and gave him just what he wanted

in a patchwork composition.

I made the man sound like quite a gentleman.

Check his epitaph against his deeds

and you'll find not one ounce of truth in a hundred pounds.

If this epitaph is passed on

who can know who's really a paragon and who is not?

Maybe people will quote my epitaph

so it ends up in the history books.

Now it's clear to me: at least half

of history is pure lies.

¹
Long and Huang: famous Han dynasty ministers.

²
Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi: well-known scholars and philosophers of the Song dynasty.

On the flower path,

flower path,

a sad person's lone shadow appears.

Deep night, chill moon, ice wind,

where is that broken flute from a tower?

Broken flute,

broken flute,

you sing the news of early plum flowers.

Dawn window. I rise and roll up the curtain

and cold slices my fingers like scissor blades.

Last night in sparse rain and wind

countless crab apple flowers

turned wretchedly thin and red.

Maybe it's the flowers that have made me sick.

I am too sluggish to look in the mirror.

The sun is tall but I don't even comb out my hair.

I just listen to swallows murmuring about spring sorrow.

All my way home I gaze on mountains

as in the mountains my road turns.

A thin cloud and pavilion rain darkens the setting sun.

Here and there are white flowering reeds.

The wind is caterwauling.

Since ancient times, graves have crowded other graves,

and not just broken tombstones.

How many people are burying bones and how many in grief?

In snow a red stove starts and goes cold again,

fated to become ash.

Old moonlight

shining in the old window.

I'm too lazy to find the old
sheng
music scores by the window.

Let spring be long or short,

flowers fall or bloom.

I have never seen

long-gone flowing light regained.

For no good reason I woke from a new dream

and saw clear in my mind

how each year is exactly the same,

the same autumn chill,

the same sadness,

same separation.

Why do we need elixirs to make our pink faces stay

if butterflies can fly in pairs

oblivious of how soon spring will die?

A courtyardful of bitter rain

has sent autumn home;

only the poetic impulse has no place to land,

disappearing into white clouds and red trees.

At dusk comes a cold moon and a misty grief.

The Xiang curtain will not release from its silver hook

but tonight my dream will travel on the wind,

carrying a chill and flying out from the jade tower.

Here is a volume of
Enduring Sorrow
and a book of Buddhist sutras.

For ten years I hid desires, for ten years read by lamplight

listening to autumn on the banana leaves.

I tried to weep but couldn't, so I forced a smile.

I couldn't escape from sorrow, so I learned to forget

and to mislead people with clever talk.

Don't tell me that women can't make heroes,

I rode ocean wind alone eastward for ten thousand
li.

My poetic thoughts chased sails between sea and heaven.

My dreaming soul lingered with a crystal moon in the three islands of Japan.

I grieve to think of China's brass guardian camels sunk in thorns.

I'm ashamed—I have no real victories. I've just made my horses sweat.

So much national enmity hurts my heart.

How can I spend my days as a traveler here enjoying spring wind?

Who talked passionately with me about fighting common enemies?

Who idolized the traveling swordsman Guo Jie?
¹

Now things have gotten so dangerous,

please change your girl's garments for a Wu sword.

*
Qiu Jin sent this poem as a letter to her close friend Xu Jichen. After Qiu Jin's death, Xu Jichen and Wu Zhiyin risked their lives and had a tomb built for her by the Xileng Bridge at West Lake in Hangzhou province.

¹
Guo Jie was a well-known Han dynasty traveling swordsman who devoted his life to fighting for justice and helping those in need.

Dante and Byron are my masters.

My talent is like rivers and oceans, but my fate's thin as a silk

thread. Don't let my red string break for a beauty. Who will listen to my lone fury, my sour emotion?

Green Jade, don't brood over your coarse background.

You are a fairy from my hometown; only you can erode my soul.

My robe is flecked with dots and dots like cherry petals,

half from your lipstick, and half from tears.

From a tall tower a flute plays spring drizzle.
¹

When will I return to watch the Zhejiang tide?

With straw sandals and a broken bowl no one recognizes me.

Which cherry blossom bridge am I stepping over?

Facing the wall for nine years, I was enlightened about emptiness

and appearance. Returning home with my monk's staff
²
I regretted having met you. I'm sorry that I have disappointed you so much. I can only let others be the zither under your fingers.
³

Let moth eyebrows covet my Zen heart;

to a Buddha, love and loathing are the same.

In my bamboo hat and palm-bark rain cape I'm gone;

I do not love and I do not hate anyone.

I detest blossoms and willows in mist.

After drifting in the East Sea for twenty years,

having purged all love, all empty forms and colors,

by Pipa Lake I sleep with a sutra for a pillow.

I stole a taste of dew from a celestial beauty's lips.

Now I keep wiping my eyes against wind.

Each day missing you makes me age faster.

What can I do? My lonely window holds twilight.

¹
”Spring Drizzle” is a famous sad song for the vertical flute.

²
The monk's staff is called the “khakkhara” and is known as an “alarm staff” because it is covered with metal rings that jingle. In this way Buddhist monks can scare off predators when they travel and warn small creatures of their approach so that they won't be stepped on. The khakkhara is often depicted in the hands of Buddhas and bodhisattvas in Buddhist art.

³
The last line is from Huang Jun's lyric song
“yijiangnan”:
“my wish in life, to be a zither producing music—I can get close to the slender fingers of a beauty, and sing in the lap of her silk skirt—even if I have to die it will be great.”

CHINESE LITERATURE IN THE MODERN ERA HAD TO CONTEND
with the reality of a century of political upheaval and regular warfare, the humiliating influence of Western colonial powers and an expansionist Japan, and the end of the imperial order with the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Under the leadership of Dr. Sun Yat-sen's United League, rebel groups enlisted the aid of army officers and put an end to Manchu rule. A settlement was negotiated with the head general of the Manchus, Yuan Shikai, in which Yuan would become president and arrange for the abdication of the Qing emperor. Yuan was elected president in 1912 by a revolutionary council in Nanjing, and thus the Republic of China was born.

Yuan Shikai was not at heart a democratic leader. After a series of power struggles, Sun Yat-sen fled to Japan, and Yuan dissolved parliament and became a dictator. During World War I he attempted to restore the monarchy and crown himself king. Revolts spread around the country. Yuan, having lost control of much of his empire, died in 1916 of natural causes, and China fractured into many small powers, entering an era of competing warlords. Sun Yat-sen established a base in the south and vied for power with warlords to the north. He had founded the Nationalist Party (the Guomindang) in 1912 from the remains of his old United League, but it had been suppressed by Yuan Shikai. It resurfaced after Yuan Shikai's death and became the most important player in the struggle to unite China and expel foreign invaders. It was joined in this effort by another young party, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which grew out of the radical May Fourth Movement and began to spread in the 1920s.

In 1923 Sun Yat-sen allowed CCP members to join his Nationalist
Party. The Communists did so but maintained a separate identity within the party. Sun Yat-sen died of cancer in 1925, before he could achieve his dream of a unified China. A split developed between the conservative and radical factions of his party, culminating in the expulsion of the Communists by Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Nationalist army and the head of state as of 1928. Chiang Kai-shek focused on battling the Communists, but when war broke out with the Japanese in 1937 he made an alliance with the Communists against the foreign invaders. Following the war with the Japanese, a civil war broke out between the Nationalists and Communists, resulting in the establishment of a Communist state in 1949. Chiang and his followers fled to Taiwan, where they established a rival state.

There were parallel developments in Chinese literature and education. The elimination of the civil service examination system in 1905 led to a new educational movement, with thousands of Chinese pursuing a modern education in Japan, the United States, and Europe. In 1911 an educational system based on the American model was instituted. Modern schools spread across China, as did modern ideas promulgated by the new intellectuals, whose radical rethinking of Chinese culture came together in the New Culture Movement. Inspired by Enlightenment principles of equality, liberty, and dispassionate scientific inquiry, as well as by socialism and anarchism, they sought ways of making China strong in the face of Western imperialism. Important intellectual journals of the time included
New Youth
and
New Tide
, which celebrated literature written in the vernacular. In a key essay (“Some Modest Proposals,” 1917), Hu Shi called for the elimination of allusion, parallelism, imitation of the ancients, and clichéd and formal language and advocated writing in “vulgar diction,” arguing that “It is preferable to use the living words of the twentieth century than the dead words of three millennia past.” This literary revolution freed Chinese writers from the restrictions of classical Chinese forms and produced a literature in what was called “plain speech” writing that was readily comprehensible to Chinese readers. Chinese intellectuals devoured translations of Western literature and attempted to adapt Western themes, forms, and techniques to writing in Chinese.

The literary reform movement was part of a larger movement named for an incident on May
⁴
, 1919, in which thousands of
Beijing students protested the Versailles Peace Conference, which gave the German concessions in Shandong province to Japan. A crackdown led to deaths and mass arrests, and protests and strikes spread across the country, forcing the government to decide against signing the treaty. The May Fourth Movement spawned countless publications and created an intellectual ferment that helped to spread the new vernacular literature. The vernacular literature movement was also embraced by the Communists, among them Guo Moruo of the Creation Society, who attacked the elitism of classical Chinese literature and championed a literature of the people: “The literature we need is a socialistic and realistic literature that sympathizes with the proletarian classes.” Other new writers sought to imitate such Western movements and forms as French Symbolism, Imagism, the prose poem, and even the sonnet. As exciting as this was for the development of Chinese poetry, these radical breaks from tradition signaled the end of poetry's central place in Chinese culture. As Michelle Yeh notes, “The abolition of the civil service examination in 1904—for which a command of the poetic art was desirable, if not required—closed the most important avenue of upward mobility; and extensive implementation of Westernized education shifted the emphasis from the humanities to science and technology. Consequently, poetry lost its privileged position as the cornerstone of moral cultivation, a tool for political efficacy, and the most refined form of social liaison. It came to be viewed instead as a highly specialized, private, and socially peripheral pursuit.”
¹

As with pre-Revolution Chinese poetry, post-1949 Chinese poetry is closely tied to politics. According to the Confucian tradition, literature served a didactic and moral purpose, an understanding that was affirmed in the People's Republic of China. The call by early radical writers for a proletarian literature that served the revolutionary cause became state doctrine after the Revolution succeeded in 1949. Under the Communists, literature that did not preach revolution was useless and, worse, counterrevolutionary. As Mao wrote, those who refused to praise “the proletariat, the Communist Party, New Democracy, and socialism” were “mere termites in the revolutionary ranks.” Authors and intellectuals found themselves the victims of a series of purges, from the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976. It is no surprise, then, that much of the poetry produced in China after 1949 is unmitigated propaganda of a relatively low quality. Even well-known authors with some talent, such as Guo Moruo, wrote terrible verse, with howlingly bad lines like

After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, China moved into a new phase, seeking to find ways of incorporating the economic power of capitalism into the social egalitarianism of Communism. With economic change came at least a few gestures toward cultural openness. A new literature in China began to emerge, tentatively at first, in underground publications, along with a Democracy Movement with which many writers were associated. The most important school of poets to come out of this time was the Misty Poets, who had begun to gather privately during the Cultural Revolution to talk about and share poems and who published an underground journal called
Today.
These poets began writing an obscure (that is, “misty”) poetry that went carefully—or headlong—into the forbidden territory of critique of totalitarian repression. As Bei Dao writes, “no way will I kneel/to state assassins/who lock up the winds of freedom.” Instead, he writes, “in times with no heroes/I'll just be a man.” In this context, even a simple love poem was revolutionary (or counterrevolutionary, depending on one's perspective), because it celebrated a personal, rather than a social, identity.

As had happened so many times in the past with the People's Republic of China, the movement toward cultural openness was but one swing of the pendulum. Challenged by student dissent and calls for democracy, the government imposed a series of repressive campaigns in the 1980s that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. The People's Army was called in to disperse Democracy Movement protesters who had camped out in the square,
and hundreds, perhaps thousands, were massacred. Many contemporary Chinese poets (including a number of the Misties, such as Bei Dao, Yang Lian, and Duo Duo) have since gone into exile.

The literature of China in the late twentieth century has thus become a literature of diaspora. In many ways this is part of an ongoing diaspora from China that began with Chinese immigration to the United States in the nineteenth century (and the writing of poems on the walls of the immigration detention center on Angel Island) and continued with the literature produced in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Though this larger Pacific Rim literature falls outside the scope of this book, we have included the work of Luo Fu, among the finest of Taiwanese poets, and of Ha Jin, a contemporary Chinese writer who lives in the United States and writes in English, to give a taste of this larger field of inspiration and accomplishment.